coming up it's the place where the u.s. sends those they call on triable guantanamo bay it's also the place where a massive hunger strike is underway and now we learn the u.s. military wants millions to upgrade get money look at the cost ahead. and people for the ethical treatment of animals is an organization devoted to protecting our furry friends that are aboard out of virginia says last year the group put down sixteen hundred cats and dogs at their shelter last peta about this practice coming up. and it's thursday so that means it's time to talk tech you know twitter turned seven today and they've obtained a new batch what does this mean for those of us that we will find out later in the show.

it's thursday march twenty first eight pm here in washington d.c. i'm liz wall and you're watching our t.v. . we begin today with guantanamo bay as a hunger strike there continues a general is now telling congress that the base needs one hundred seventy million dollars for repair general john kelly the top commander of the u.s. southern command says the base is in dire need of upgrades he says the barracks and dining hall there are deteriorating general kelly says these repairs are critical for u.s. troops stationed in one ton of oil but he says the conditions detainees are living in are just find this out their prisoners are still on a hunger strike after forty four days and they say it's to protest the conditions they live in and that the copies of the koran that they had were taken from them and mishandled but general kelly says the reason the prisoners are on strike is because they're angry at the president for not closing the prison like he said he would from our i was joined earlier by retired colonel morris davis former to

prosecutor michael and he's also a law prefers professor at howard university and he began by saying that this multi-million dollar request seems to be a sign that guantanamo bay isn't closing anytime soon. it's interesting general kelly said you know guantanamo was intended to be a temporary facility so the things that were built were intended to last for a few years not for a decade or more and you know we're eleven years now so it's another what hundred fifty two hundred seventy million on top of the hundred twenty million the spent every year just on the recurring cost of keeping the detainees there so going along with what the general said so i mean it was the intention for this place to shut down but now we're just in so deep that that's just not feasible right when i was involved as cheap prosecutor we designed the expeditionary courtroom which was a prefab type building because it was intended to be used for a couple of years and then disassembled and taken apart never used again but that

was back in two thousand and six two thousand and seven and the clock keeps running in the facilities just weren't meant to last for ten or eleven years i want to take a look now at some of the things that general kelly pointed out as things he needs money for one of them a new twelve million dollars dining hall for the troops a new one hundred excuse me eleven million dollars hospital and medical units for detainees and almost eleven million dollars for a communication network facility to store data and computer records and things like that so. aside from the hospital get most. general kelly says detainees the conditions they're living in that that they are us subjected to are just fine is that the case i've been down there in a couple of years but i believe that's probably correct because their facilities were built modern modeled after prisons here in the u.s. so they were mainly more permanent type structures that is the general said

a lot of these guys are getting older they've been there ten or eleven years and some are beginning to get into that geriatric medical state get more really what equipped to handle so you know it's really interesting to me you've got the fiscal can. services here that are trying to pass a budget with drastic cuts but here we've got guantanamo where they want to spend one hundred twenty million dollars a year to keep in essence eighty guys that we really want to keep incarcerated plus another hundred fifty million on top of that so you know in a few years that adds up to a considerable amount of money now they're talking about defunding n.p.r. i mean the n.p.r. budget you could fund for a couple of decades based on what we're spending and they're asking for millions and millions of dollars on something that president obama said was going to close long ago. you talked about the health that they're the health concerns that they're facing there and many of them had been there for quite a while over a decade and now there is this hunger strike which surely isn't making their health

conditions any better the detainee say that they're going on a hunger strike to protest that some of their personal belongings korans were mishandled but a general came out and said something different they said that they're actually angry at president obama for not closing the prison like you said that he lied about the real reason i don't know if there are they had hope and hope and change in mind as well as an obama took office and i guess they've been just this illusion does a lot of us that bought into that slogan is well that you know you've got a majority dominik one ton of eighty six of one hundred sixty six who have been cleared for transfer who have been in confinement now for you know more than a decade in some cases so for them the hunger strike you know they're kind of out of sight now to mind in the only way to potentially call attention to it is to do something drastic like a hunger strike so the numbers you know d.o.d.'s said the numbers come from seven to fourteen to twenty one to have leave twenty five is the last official number but if you talk to some of the attorneys that have been down there they say that's

a lowball figure that is probably three or four times that right now they are getting some attention what do you think it will take for for this basic to close down well i think it's going to take the american people paying attention and demanding that it be closed i mean if you look at the issue. drones i mean the program with drones went on for a number of years and not much really happened until suddenly people here paid attention to grand paul you're doing a very buster right is going to take the american public focusing their attention on guantanamo and unfortunately it takes sometimes people dying for that so i guess maybe it's more awareness of the issue to get well knowing if you will and that is a lot of money being wasted at one ton of and a lot of our prestige is going down the tubes as well which is no good reason to keep it in a great really great to have you here that was retired colonel morris davis a law professor at howard university now you're probably well aware of the animal rights group peta their ads are kind of hard to forget some so racy they've been

banned from television like this what. i. turns out the people for ethical treatment of animals might have a spotty record when it comes to animal treatment according to a report released from the virginia department of agriculture and consumer service says peta killed a shocking ninety percent of the pats under its care at norfolk virginia at their shelter and that's one thousand six hundred forty seven cats and dogs just last year only one thousand for a place in adoptive homes you're probably thinking how is this possible is this organization supposed to save animals or there was joined by a.p. to spokesperson bruce willis and give us the story behind the numbers. well peta

makes no secret at all that we have to euthanize most of the animals we take in but that's because most of the animals we take in are sick or injured or dying or they're brought to us by people who see that their companion animals are at the end of their lives and they're too poor to be able to afford an expensive trip to the vet for euthanasia they know that if they bring the animal to us we will not turn them away in fact we don't turn away any animal ever we take in all the worst case scenario animals and because we do that we're able to offer a service to the community that unfortunately often involves euthanasia we give those companion animals a quick merciful release from their suffering ok you won't turn them away but as we see the vast majority of them are killed so i mean if they must handle it and of getting killed why bring them to peta that mean chances are we know what their fate is going to be. oh peta has many many successful rescue stories as i said the

majority of animals who come to us are dying and they face a quicker more merciful death with us than they would in their current condition and people know that and they use peta as a shelter of last resort ok i mean i want to ask you because you know peta really has a very strong advertising can pan and it's known for its provocative advertising do you think that. people see this and at the same time you guys are killing animals so i mean this can you see why this can be viewed as hypocritical. oh well the provocative ads only draw more attention to our website where we're able to talk about the serious issues like the real culprit here which is the animal overpopulation crisis that's really the enemy that needs to be addressed and all of our efforts are aimed at addressing its animal overpopulation crisis oh my yes

every year six to eight million animals enter u.s. animal shelters and roughly half of them that's over four million animals have to be euthanized because there simply aren't enough good homes for them right we had only to get arrested over there we just saw an ad. practically almost naked women tossing around vegetables how does that get the word out about the overpopulation of animals and how to properly address that well actually that was for our v good and campaign getting people to stop eating meat which of course is the greatest killer of animals that's currently going on on the planet and although some people see it as provocative and it is happen to be one of our most highly viewed videos of all time and that brings people to our website which then allows us to engage them in conversations about why they should go vegan and what it does for their health and the environment not to mention the animals plus all of the other animal issues that people. is heavily involved in you know some might ask i saw that peta

has a budget of about thirty six million dollars that maybe some of that money should go away from those celebrity stunts and racy ads and go towards actually saving animals. a huge amount of our budget goes toward the heart and soul of our work which our undercover investigations provocative ads that you're talking about are successful well in fact you're talking about them and that's proof that they are successful that's what people see so that is one of the main ways that we use. the media and social media to be able to get our message out there but. if you go to peta dot org and look at the work that we do for peta saves dot com which which gives a comprehensive overview of all the animals that we have saved in all the areas where they suffer the worst abuses i think you'll see that. our budget is going to

the right causes are i mr whalen appreciate you coming on the show that was a spokesperson for peta thank you for having me. still ahead here on our t.v. today just happens to be a twitter birthday and what do you give as a gift for such should hang out. tell you more in our tech report after the break. the same story doesn't make good news. no puff pieces the tough questions if you. actually deadly blizzard taking aim for the northeast it's expected to hit starting in a few hours from new york to maine we have team coverage of the storm. we're watching is the very heavy snow moving into boston properly or today. you can see it start to become much more every day. and there's still

a lot of snow out here and a good place for snow. and it's pretty incredible day there and record snowfall throughout much of it might still be slightly driverless is something we're just seeing here. the worst you are the only thing only i don't have a. radio guy and. i want the reply good if you've never seen anything like that. now to the latest developments in the tech world twitter has revolutionized the way

we communicate and now they have a passion for their messaging system they now have the rights for the technology that allows a singer single user to get the same message in multiple places and the computer fraud and abuse act has been used lately to prosecute cyber crimes it was written in the eighty's but some say it doesn't make sense and the technology dependent world we live in today now another man has been convicted and is going to jail is that justice and speaking of prosecuting cyber crimes the family of the late internet activist and innovator aaron swartz is in a battle with mit but now the university has announced plans to publicly release documents related to swartz prosecution earlier i was joined by john harmon editor of buzz feed tech and r.t. producer bob english i start off by asking john about the twitter pattern. twitter's patent is written like a lot of software patents which is to say it's seems too obvious to be patentable

but apple's got tons of patents like this twitter has a few already for example twitter owns the patent to poll to refresh you know when you pull down your message list and it refreshes twitter is unique in the tech world and that it sort of it has set itself against the general movement of aggressively enforcing patents it's a said in the past and in relation to this patent that it will only defensively use its patents it's hard to imagine someone suing twitter for operating a twitter like service but the patent trolling is a and increasingly serious issue in tech so how to make sense for them to get this bad what do you think bob could this have an effect on innovation in social media certainly because a patent is a form of monopoly privilege and even if it's only temporary for a certain number of years so twitter is saying that they're going to use this as a defensive measure only well what does that mean i mean would they go on the offensive with that. i'm tempted to think that if a competitor sprung up with

a similar business model that they wouldn't hesitate to use it if they got big enough right i think that's what happens in these we're going to talk about it later the computer fraud and abuse act some people say that that is too vague and not specific and worry that this broad language could lead to over prosecution in certain instances and actually that's exactly why some say happened to andrew arnheim our twenty seven year old twenty seven year old computer hacker known on the internet as we've he was just sentenced to forty one months in prison for discovering a security flaw. website john is this fair or is this site the sign of another law that is out of date and needs to be updated. i think this story is getting lost a little bit we've because of his reputation as a hacker and sort of a bit of a troll. is is like not the most sympathetic figure in a situation like this but what he did with eighteen to you was actually in many

ways a service to the company and to customers he exposed a security flaw and he reported that maybe not in the most responsible way he went to the press and he shared. some details of the exploit with with other hackers but there was there are really clear signs of malice in what he did and i think that some of that's getting lost because of his his personality and his reputation i think the laws under which he's being prosecuted or overly broad and they're being interpreted in extremely broad way and there's a direct line you can draw but tween what's going on with weave and what happened to aaron swartz and they are in some cases companies pay for somebody to point out these security flaws right right had he been on had he been on payroll he could have been making six figures doing the same thing i want to turn the conversation now to aaron swartz as you mentioned john there is a link there and swartz faced decades in prison he allegedly broke into the mit

computer to make academic journals public and after after he took his own life many say prosecutors went way too far and pursuing have now mit is making documents public what does this mean for the case. first they're not making everything entirely public in the rejecting certain names and there is a bit of a fight going on the judge in the case actually has discretion whether or not to release this so it's not completely transparent process so far so is it fair we don't know that's up to the judge right now. i think just thirty seconds left what do you think this means for the case john. i think it more than consequences for the. quinces for mit in a from a p.r. standpoint i think they're doing this to distance themselves from what has been you know a tragic and very public spectacle they have repeatedly tried to sort of disown what happened and i think there's there they may be using this as

a way to sort of further distance themselves from from what have i rather erin i guess we're going to have to wait and see gentlemen thank you both for weighing in on this tech talk today on this thursday that was john hermann editor of buzz feed tack an hour to producer bob english well today is the international day for elimination of racial discrimination it's a day we'll look back on the country's dark history of race relations and look at the issue as it stands today and on the surface it looks like we've come a long way after all we have a first black family but to what extent does racism still exist if you look at who's locked up. in the u.s. it appears to still be quite a problem listen to this professor americans african american studies at georgetown university what you see not always young especially black and latino families and you released a bit just the growth of the poverty rate as i see it in d.c. the poverty rate so. as to normal so how far have we really come when it comes to

race in the united states to discuss i was joined earlier by our two producers and rachel courteous. well i think that as far as role modeling goes for children of color certainly seeing a black family in the white house is of. is certainly progress whether that means that racial discrimination goes away especially for people on the streets who aren't living in the white house who are say living in cities or even towns i think that you'll find that racial discrimination very much exists as does other forms of just the fact that we do have a black president represents some progress definitely doesn't mean that it's not an issue today. want to ask you. i think race has become a very complicated issue these days but it's really everywhere even when it comes to hell in a cab i know you told me a story related to this earlier. like you were say. when you come back to the

president being black i mean today pew research just released a new fact saying that you know his his rating has gone down even further and but to mention the cab story it's really interesting i just moved to d.c. a few weeks ago and i was talking to one of my friends and she said to me. if you know go out there and try to get a cab and i was like why don't you do it and she says to me are you crazy like i'm black i can't get a cab and i was like you're not serious right and so i had to go and get a cab because it was night time because apparently there's this thing here in d.c. where if you're black you might not get picked up by a cab and so i'm just baffled by that what what i'm not even white i'm latino i'm my father's peruvian my skin is why it's a very mixed question for me and for anyone of ethnic background but the fact is that like if you're black in d.c. your chances of getting a cab are pretty low. yeah rachel what do you think about that right here in d.c.

and then it's capital so i got a little bit of background from a cab driver who is explaining his impotence he explained to me that he does not pick up young african-american men on the street particularly at night and the reason he gave me was this one time he did in the northeast of d.c. pick up. a group of three young african-american men and they ultimately stole his car and beat him up and then ended up crashing the car so this isn't to say at least in my opinion i don't think that everyone who is african-american is going to do that certainly not to the contrary but for this for this taxi driver he was so shaken by the experience by that one moment that he was willing to engage in racial discrimination even though he knew it was against the law and against the rules he signed as a cab driver because of an experience he had faced so i think that in till we get past seeing entire groups of people based on one experian. you've had racial discrimination such as we've talked about with these cabs will continue interesting

sometimes a pop culture popular culture really shines a light on the way things are in our country today what do you think when it comes to consumerism the media entertainment does it point to maybe some things in our race relations today rachel what do you think sure will there's a very interesting example recently alexis texas is a pornography star and she recently came out saying that she refuses to have sex with black men in her videos you know a lot of people came out and this created a lot of controversy a lot of people came out saying you know what alexis texas this makes you a racist a lot of other people said how does this make you rate how does this make her racist she just has a preference she just say prefers white or that or latino or asian men to black men personally but what we've found doing research is that another grand hypothesis for this is that the majority of her audience is white and she fears that if she

engages in interracial pornography that a lot of her audience may be turned off and therefore she won't be as valuable as as a commodity or as able to make money at her job and you know other and other people have said also that interracial pornography plays very much on stereotypes about what it is like when people of different races have sex and that is very much plays on these stereotypes and as such is racist in itself so the more it seems that we try and glean answers about race and racial discrimination the more questions are raised very interesting i want to ask you have you know because we live in this post nine eleven world and we've seen this rise of islamophobia is that population here in the u.s. a new target for hate crimes and racial discrimination. i mean i think that's a very very good question especially bringing the topic back to the day that we're celebrating today that the u.n. has announced that it's the international day for the elimination of racial discrimination and ultimately if you go back to the iran contra scandal here in the

u.s. they were not necessarily the most welcoming of feelings towards iranian americans or perhaps iranian refugees were that were living in the united states now let us keep in mind that you know it's difficult to come and to live here in the states if you are from a different background that we're not familiar with you know i remember when i first moved here to the u.s. i was put in a sort of students with for difficulties class who had trouble learning and i had no trouble learning i was just put in that class and sort of. you know forced to be there and i remember like saying to my my parents my teachers at the time like why am i here and there they were saying oh it's because you're different and i had to sort of like fight my way out of there in my first few years here living in the united states because i wasn't born and bred here i guess well you know you hear a lot in your parents and then and that everybody wants to be different right i got

me appreciate your beltway again on this that was our key produces getting our i and rachel currently at. well there's news in the air of obama supposedly planning to change things up with the u.s. drone program lower finessed of the president as more. drones are in the news again people just love to talk about these crazy privacy invading child killing and also terrorist eliminating manned plank vehicles don't they they're in the news for like five different reasons right now but the one i'm talking about is supposedly the obama administration is getting ready to shift the

cia's portion of the drone program over to the pentagon by will no longer control part of america's drone the military will oversee the whole show apparently this would be such a great move because it would create one uniform that of rules and regulations per hour the u.s. uses drones around the world. also the military has to answer to other agencies and people unlike the cia this means that the drone program would be more accountable you see the cia's drone program is covertly while the military's program is clear and best dime covert means that it has the brits and deniable under law which means they can do whatever they want basically glenn death dying means the correct but not deniable under law which means if someone gets those with the military is up to or at the military is somehow exposed they have to come out to their secret in

other words cia equals secrets and can lie military equals the brits no care of law and i totally trust that semantic difference don't you so this whole moving to drone program completely over to the military is just a gosh darn good thing to help the program become more transparent and on the up enough i'm sure it is nothing to do with the fact that this whole merging idea with created by john brennan the new cia director who might be wanting to take some of the heat off of this the i.a.e.a. by distancing itself from the controversial drone program it can't be that right and i'm sure it is nothing to do with the fact that obama has become known in some circles as the drone kiran and that he needs a policy talking point to try to do some damage control over how people are thinking about him and his drones right now that kids be it but listen regardless of the boaters behind it and regardless of the paperwork or pura pratt's are now

going to have to shuffle around because of it this program shift will not affect the man's love birds drove washington can issue a thousand press releases and make as many speeches as it wants but the bottom line is aren't using unmanned flying vehicles to surveil and people will continue to drone on tonight let's talk about that by me on twitter. at the ready. that's going to do it for now but for more on the stories we covered check out our youtube channel youtube dot com slash r t america will post everything online there in full or check out our website r t dot com slash usa and to find out what i'm up to when i'm not on the air you can follow me on twitter at liz well i'm always interested here questions thoughts or feedback so tweet at me have a great night.